SKY · CLOSE APPROACHES
Asteroids Passing Close to Earth
Space rocks pass by Earth constantly — and almost every one is a harmless, precisely-predicted flyby that never makes the news it deserves. Here's what's coming within ten lunar distances over the next few months, how big each one roughly is, how fast it's moving, and — the question everyone actually asks — whether it's anything to worry about. (Spoiler: it isn't.)
Loading the latest close approaches from NASA/JPL…
“Is an asteroid going to hit Earth?”
Almost certainly not — and not by luck, but by measurement. NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) tracks every known near-Earth object and calculates its path decades ahead. The objects on this page are close approaches: rocks that pass near Earth on a known, confirmed trajectory that misses us. “Close” in space terms is still enormous — a pass at one lunar distance is about 384,000 km away, the entire width of the Moon's orbit. When astronomers do find something with any impact probability at all, it goes on a public risk list and is observed intensively until the orbit is pinned down — which, so far, has always reduced the risk to zero. The genuinely scary scenarios are objects we haven't found yet, which is exactly why surveys like these run every night.
How to read a close approach
Miss distance is shown in lunar distances (LD) — multiples of the average Earth–Moon gap. Size is usually estimated from how bright the object is (its absolute magnitude), because most are too small and far to measure directly; a dark rock and a shiny one of the same brightness can differ in size by a factor of two, so we show a range and flag it as an estimate. Speedis the relative velocity at closest approach. None of these objects are visible to the naked eye — they're tracked by professional survey telescopes — but the very largest, brightest passes can sometimes be caught in a backyard telescope.